


If I Might

by englishable



Series: Hieros Gamos [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Body Positivity, F/M, Pirate Angel Baby Indeed, of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-08 01:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18885658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: Among their various other attributions, the mortals once worshiped Thor as a fertility god. This is an odd and rather awkward choice, in Sif's estimation, but she could not call it an entirely inaccurate one.Now as well as then, he is an exceptionally fine man for looking at.





	If I Might

...

Hildegund is a woman of abundant proportions and more abundant good humor who talks at the vigorous, bellowing pitch of a teamster driving mules, so that everyone is left to wonder how she and Volstagg have avoided deafening one another in their century of happy marriage. Nobody has quite figured it out.

She is a midwife by profession and is utterly unflappable in the face of hemorrhage, rupture, shoulder dystocia, breech presentation and feather-brained husbands. If barrenness is on the woman’s side of things, Hildegund will usually prescribe a concoction of honey and cinnamon that almost always does the trick; if it is discovered to be the man’s problem, which happens more frequently than men like to think, Hildegund will suggest he try a regimen of nettle tea and perhaps keep his nose out of the beer flagons for a while.

Such advice is not to be taken lightly. Hildegund has borne Volstagg eleven children thus far and the one she carries will be their twelfth, an astonishing fact which – among the new brides and young mothers, anyway – confers upon her a status second only to Queen Frigga. 

Sif, who has had both arms and five ribs broken at some point or another and knows what it feels like to have an arrow pushed clear through her thigh so that its tip might be snapped off, regards the whole process with a sort of outsider’s venerating awe. A battle may be over in five minutes, after all, or over before you even know it has begun; a woman who is with child must wait nearly a year for her time, and then she may spend the next two or three days in the thrall of her own body and its ancient, terrible powers of creation.

On a whole, Sif decides she would prefer the arrows. She likes children very much, the bright-eyed girls who ask to look at her sword and the wild-haired boys who wave for her to toss back their ball whenever it lands in one of the training yards, and hopes she might reserve the possibility of changing her mind at some later time.

For now, however, she prefers the arrows.

 “—Still, I’d think you would know enough by now to keep yourself out of these little predicaments,” one of the older women tells Hildegund; a group of them sit steaming in the cedar bathhouse while red coals hiss in the brazier. “I’d have kicked that man out of my bed years ago.”

“You mind your own business,” Hildegund answers, with cheer. “It seems to me you’ve had a sight more trouble keeping anybody in your bed than you’ve had getting them out of it.”

“Either way, I don’t see the fun in lying down with a big heavy boar like the one you’ve got.”

“What a lucky thing that he’s mine and not yours, then. When I’m being covered by a man I prefer to know he’s really there.”

Sif sinks past her earlobes in the warm water. She must look Volstagg in the face every day and such conversations present a certain danger to her professionalism, or at least to her self-composure.  Still, she prefers it to the way women talk about Fandral’s arch, slender hands or Hogun’s quiet, gravelly voice. The descriptors she has heard applied to Loki’s legs alone could fill a folio – even from the women who prefer other women, for pity’s sake, and speak purely from an aesthetic standpoint – and she once listened to someone state frankly how they would like to spread Thor on a piece of toast like marmalade so they could eat him alive.

She cannot even begin to comprehend what that might mean.

“Oh, dear,” says Hildegund, after the women’s general laughter has faded. “I’m afraid we’ve embarrassed Lady Sif.”

Sif, with forced nonchalance, surfaces again to gust water from her nose. She is conscious of their eyes on a newly-formed scar that cuts a deep, diagonal slash across her collarbone and over her left breast, earned six weeks ago on Vanaheim when a double-blade axe carved through her armor. She curbs the urge to hide it.

“Hardly.” Sif wrings her dripping hair. “If I allowed anything about those four to embarrass me I would’ve lost my mind a hundred years ago.”

“We wouldn’t have blamed you. That golden boy of yours is quite enjoyable to look at, isn’t he?”

One of the other women swirls a hand through the water. “He’d know that better than we would, I’m sure, considering how much enjoyment he seems to get from looking at himself.”

This is not true and Sif knows it. Thor does not need to consult mirrors as a confirmation of his splendor and simply walks around in blithe, beaming assurance of it. He can probably just feel it, gathered about his person, a kind of magnetizing energy like the air before a lightning strike. Sometimes it gives Sif the inexplicable and adoring urge to punch him in the nose.

But Sif cannot say a ridiculous thing like this aloud, so she does not respond. The woman who is swirling her hand through the water pauses for a moment to think.

“And the mortals used to – you all remember this, don’t you? Those Norsemen?” She consults a bather beside her for affirmation.  “They were convinced our young Thor was a fertility god.”

“Ah, mercy, that’s right. I’d forgotten. They sent up offerings to him and everything.” The first, older woman raises her eyebrows significantly. “I can well see why.”

“I can’t, a pretty creature like that. He looks like the sort who'd do everything at a mad sprint. They ought to have picked out Volstagg for the honor if they had to choose anybody – isn’t that right, Hildegund?”

Sif keeps on twisting her hair. She hopes they will not remember the other part of what the mortals once believed, the more foolish part, which was that Sif herself was the wife of Thor – goddess of the faithful marriage, goddess of the family, goddess of the wheat fields upon which pour the storms and rains – and was also the mother to his supposed children. In some stories there is only a daughter and in others there is both a daughter and twin sons.

(And Sif has her own longings, of course, her own inmost wishes, but she keeps these to herself. Thor will never find them out, not even by accident, which she has already determined is for the best.)

Nobody remembers that part of the story, fortunately, and then Hildegund laughs. She has hauled herself up from the water at about the same time as Sif and stands there, smiling unabashedly, her full body lined with shell-pink marks from the childbearing.  She draws a drying-cloth around herself and winks.  

“Well, let’s give the boy some time to grow up,” she says. “He may surprise us.”

…

Sif forgets this conversation within three days of its occurrence and only remembers it again some four hundred and thirty years later. The circumstances are as follows:

She has been traveling with Thor and his new companions for a month. She stands waiting and keeping watch, her hand rested on a holstered firearm – the sword is sheathed across her back – while he and Quill haggle over the price of interstellar fuel.

Sif takes a liking to everybody in Quill’s company, even if that woman with the antennae is always giving Sif inquisitive looks and she has yet to decipher why the man named Drax refers to Thor as the Pirate Angel. Sif supposes it is due to some obscure aspect of his culture; Thor himself spent the first two weeks after finding her in a state of forbearing, pained anticipation, sequestering himself within various articles of shapeless clothing while he awaited her remarks. He might just as easily have mentioned something about Sif’s appearance, her haggard thinness or the fact that her hair has been shorn off, but of course he had said nothing of the kind.

Sif finally had said something to him, though, if only to put his torment at an end.

“You must think you’re awfully clever,” she had told him, in the midst of another conversation.

“Do I?” Thor had been seated in one of the pilot's chairs – they were the only two awake on the ship – and swung his view away from the window. “Why would that be?”

“The only way I was ever able to knock you down in practice was if I caught you low and tossed you over my shoulder.” Sif had put her foot against his chair to tilt him further towards her, hoping her smile appeared playful enough. “But I see you’ve deprived me of even that one advantage.”

“I’ve never minded having you get the better of me, Sif,” Thor had said, crossing his hands over his chest. “I’m sure you’ll find another way.”

In fact, the greatest physical change Sif notes about Thor is not even a properly physical one but is instead the absence of Mjølnir.

The hammer has never been far from his presence and Sif learned long ago to recognize its rounded, steady song as it flew through the air, a clever move if she wished to duck and avoid the inconvenience of decapitation. She grew up regarding the hammer as a thing of power and exquisite beauty and strange, leaping vitality.

Stormbreaker is not the same, exquisite and powerful as it may be. There is a more sacred, older dread to its appearance than there ever was to Mjølnir’s, the scythe-sharp curve of its enormous blade and the blue flames that lick along its handle. When Thor first showed it to Sif he had held it out, an offer to let her take it, but she had only gone so far as to touch the axe’s head – its star-metal had seemed to shiver against her fingertips like a struck tuning fork – before withdrawing.  

“You’re teasing me,” she had said. “You don’t really expect I could manage that thing by myself.”

Now, watching him at a leisurely distance, Sif hears Thor laugh at something Quill is telling the fuel-trader.

He stands with his legs set sturdily apart and wears his long hair half-gathered behind his head, the strands neater where Sif has recently clipped them at his request. His full beard is worked into a braid at its end, although that too has been trimmed just enough to reveal a subtle softness about his cheeks and chin. The air of this planet is dense with a high summer heat and he has shucked off his coat – it looks similar in tailoring to the one Quill wears; Thor disavows any attempt at imitation – to show the shirtsleeves and belt beneath it. Sif studies his profile.

There is a certain heavy swiftness to the lines of his figure like the smooth, tumbling weight of water. The capacious stomach he has thus far seemed so unhappily sensitive about jostles lightly with the warm laughter. He lifts one strong and tremendous arm to point at his chest, an emphasis, then to clap a friendly hand down on the trader’s shoulder while he says something at which the other man nods.  The cornflower-blue left eye holds his amusement – Sif has seen what is behind the patch, or under the amber-colored prosthetic where his right eye used to be – long after his laughter stops.

He looks, in short, rather lushly pleasing, or at the very least like the sort of man some woman might expect to get ten or twelve children from. Sif remembers the votive offerings, the prayers, the wheat fields beneath the rumbling thunderstorms with their bountiful rain.

Damn.

Thor turns his head to find Sif staring at him. There must be something exceedingly ridiculous but incriminatingly unmistakable in her face, because his own registers first surprise and then confusion before Sif snaps her eyes away feeling as if she might swallow her tongue. She imagines Hildegund winking at her.

Damn and damn again.

“Interesting weather they’ve got here,” Thor observes charitably, while they are walking back to the ship. He carries a huge fuel drum on his shoulder as though it is a wickerwork basket and Sif curbs another of those loving compulsions to punch him. “In heat like this you might start to think you’re seeing things.”

Sif feels a clamor in her brain and once more decides Thor cannot be allowed to find her out.  There are still a great many disorganized pieces, within his heart and mind, and Sif must not do anything that could complicate things as he decides how he will put these pieces back in order.

“You might,” she offers. “I suppose it depends on what you’re looking for.”

She walks a step quicker and therefore does not see the glance Thor gives her, which travels from the pale triangle of skin at the back of her neck to her ankles, before he snaps his eyes away as well.

…

Sif will remember those old, inmost longings, though, and much later she will tell Thor about them after all, her lips close to his ear. She will discover that one of her very favorite things is holding him, warm and weighted against her body, and Thor will not entirely understand it when, one morning, his wife starts to laugh.

“And what are you so happy about?” he asks.

He has lifted his mouth away from kissing the scar that runs from her collarbone to her left breast. His beard tickles the sensitive skin there and the shuttered-closed, empty right eye makes his face appear both wisely older and vulnerably younger at once. One of his hands rests on her belly and the child taking shape there gives a drowsy flutter under his palm.

“You’re here with me, aren’t you?” Sif says to him. “I should think that’s reason enough.”

...

**Author's Note:**

> I promised that last piece would be the end of things for now, but this brought together scraps of a few other piece I haven't been able to work in anywhere else. 
> 
> (The title is lifted from the lyrics of the highly anachronistic but catchy 1957 Brenda Lee song "Dynamite," for all your big-attraction chain-reaction moments.)


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